Gender Disgussed

Gender Disgussed
Gender and the Abject
Gender and the Abject in Sartre
by Hedwig Fraunhofer, Georgia College & State University, USA
There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism. (Walter
Benjamin, Illuminations 256)
1 In this essay I will take Julia Kristeva's concept of abjection as a starting-point to explore the relationship
of the French nation to German fascism in the twentieth century — a relationship long marked by an othering
of fascism as foreign or non-French. To investigate this relationship, I will specifically analyze the discussion
of fascism and the phobic abjection of the feminized (female or homosexual) other in the early work of
France's leading philosopher of the twentieth century, Jean-Paul Sartre. In that Sartre's work gives
expression to the extreme fear of the feminine that, as Klaus Theweleit has argued, is at the basis not only
of patriarchal society in general, but also of its extreme manifestation, fascism, it can serve as an example of
the dialectical implication even of antifascist critiques in fascist thinking.
2
As Kristeva has pointed out in Powers of Horror, the continually endangered boundary between the
inside and the (ultimately illusory) outside of a given symbolic system — such as, for instance, the nation —
can only be maintained through a process of othering. Kristeva posits that abjection occurs when the rules of
classification peculiar to a certain symbolic system cannot be maintained — that is, when "leakage" occurs.
The binary structure of patriarchal society, the basic separation of (masculinized) inside/center and
(feminized) outside/margin, cannot be kept intact. Abjection is a blurring of boundaries, a contamination of
the "proper" center by the outside. The abject is both the zone where contamination occurs and the
contaminating matter itself:
It is thus not lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection but what disturbs identity, system, order.
What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite.
(Kristeva 4)
The transgression of established separations and the impossibility of keeping these strict separations intact
produce what Kristeva calls the "abject." Abjection is thus the mechanism by means of which patriarchal
society, in the interest of establishing a clear inside/outside division, constructs the "feminine" as its other —
as everything that threatens that distinction.
3 Well-known scholars of fascism such as Klaus Theweleit have argued that the attempt to establish strict
classificatory boundaries and the abjection of alterity are at the heart not only of patriarchal societies, but to
a heightened degree also of fascist patriarchal societies. Both Theweleit's exploration of the proto-fascist
male psychic constitution in his classic work, Männerfantasien (Male Fantasies), and Kristeva's analysis of
fascism in Powers of Horror center on the fear of the invasion by the feminized other. My Kristevan analysis
of the rhetoric of alterity in Sartre's drama Les mouches, his philosophical treatise L'être et le néant, and
other early texts, reveals a patriarchal language marked by the fear of contamination and points to the
continuities between Sartre's patriarchal thinking and what Theweleit has theorized as the extreme
manifestation of patriarchal society, namely fascism.
4 I would like to emphasize clearly here that I am not claiming that Sartre was a fascist. Rather I aim to
point to the problematic nature of an "othering" of fascism. Such an "othering" has marked both Sartre's
early work and — until quite recently — France's official stance towards its role in WWII. While France's
reassessment of its war-time responsibility started in the 1960s, I argue (in response to the American
historian Robert Paxton's different assessment quoted below) that there was a long way to go from the early
questions often asked by a younger generation and the public acknowledgments by the French government
and other institutions that the second half of the 1990s saw.
5
It was Theodor Adorno who, in his Negative Dialectics, insisted on the inescapability of dialectical
contradiction, on the 'remainder' inevitably excluded in all conceptual identity. Adorno is interested in the part
of the object that is not included in the identifiable thought, in the specificity, the concrete and individual, that
is covered up by generalizing concepts. Conceptual thinking, in other words, does not readily acknowledge
the multi-valence of social experience. I would argue that this insight also applies to the concept "fascism."
Neil Levi and Michael Rothberg cite Adorno's famous and equally misunderstood statement that "to write
poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric" (12). They explain that "[w]hat initially concerned Adorno [. . .] was less
the impropriety of any artistic response to the Holocaust than how culture in general and poetry in particular
failed to recognize their own implication in the 'sinister' forces of total social integration that made the
barbarism of Auschwitz possible in the first place" (12). I argue that Sartre's work as well, while claiming
fascism as its absolute other, is also implicated in its structures.
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My essay thus explores the complicated relationship between Sartre's celebrated antifascist art and
philosophy and fascism. Although I do not intend to minimize in any way the atrocities committed under
German fascism, my argument also aims to establish the continuities between Western modernity, including
French cultural discourse, and the catastrophe that was early-twentieth century fascism.
7 Similar to the Historikerstreit (Historians' Debate) about the uniquely German nature of the Holocaust, a
debate that German intellectuals have engaged in with varying degrees of virulence since 1986 and that was
stirred up again in 1996 by Daniel Goldhagen's controversial book, Hitler's Willing Executioners, France's
and French citizens' relationship to Nazism and the German occupation of France during WWII have been
the subjects of a recurring debate. The trials of Klaus Barbie, René Bousquet and Paul Touvier, the 1997/8
trial of Maurice Papon in Bordeaux, and the revelations about François Mitterand's questionable past again
brought up the issue of the complicity of the Vichy Regime in Nazi war crimes. Former French Prime Minister
Lionel Jospin took the Papon trial as an occasion to proclaim that concerning the period of Nazi occupation,
"il n'y a pas de culpabilité de la France parce que [. . .] Vichy était la négation de la France et en tout cas la
négation de la République" (Montvalon 8).[1]
8
In spite of such proclamations denying any French complicity, the American historian Robert Paxton
wrote in 1999 that "the often expressed American view that the French won't confront the dark side of their
response to Nazi occupation has been false for thirty years. Ever since students began challenging their
elders' reticence in 1968, France has undergone binges of self-scrutiny, whose feverish and repetitive
character led Henry Rousso to give his book on history and memory the title 'The Vichy Syndrome'" ("The
Trial of Maurice Papon" 32). Indeed, for some years now, France has been engaged in what Caroline
Wiedmer calls a spectacular reassessment of its past, and specifically of its "uniquely ambiguous
relationship to Nazi Germany" (3).[2]
9
It is often argued that Sartre embodies the twentieth century better than anyone. In 2000, the French
philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy published a study of the twentieth century entitled Le siècle de Sartre. I will
posit that Sartre's work specifically highlights the ambiguities inherent, in the twentieth century, in the
tensions between fascism and antifascism. Notwithstanding Sartre's role in the intellectual Résistance and
his reputation as an antifascist writer and activist, a feminist and psychoanalytical examination of Sartre's
early texts clearly points to the limits of this antifascism. In this essay I will not discuss in more depth the
compromises Sartre made to get his work published during the occupation years — his articles in the
collaborationist cultural review Comœdia; his publishing with Gallimard, which had been
"dejewed" (désenjuivé) by the liste Otto; the public performance of his plays in occupied Paris, or other tacit
accommodations with state antisemitism. In that respect as well, Sartre is more or less typical of what Omer
Bartov calls "the moral confusion and the depth of accommodation that characterized the French
intelligentsia in the first years of the Occupation" (65-66).
10 In my textual analysis of the rhetoric of Sartre's work, I will instead start my investigation with a brief
exploration of Sartre's "Qu'est-ce qu'un collaborateur?" before embarking on a detailed examination of
Sartre's famous drama Les mouches, a play first performed in Paris in 1943 under German occupation
(1940-44). Whereas Sartre repeatedly emphasized the antifascist intentions of Les mouches, and whereas
David Carroll, in his excellent study French Literary Fascism, counts Sartre, together with Adorno, as one of
the "important antifascist theorists" (12), my analysis of the rhetoric of alterity in Les mouches and other
early texts identifies the blind spots of Sartre's anti-fascism, revealing a language that is deeply patriarchal.
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In his standard work on German fascism, Männerfantasien, Theweleit examined early-twentieth
century European fascism as the extreme manifestation of the pervasive, constitutive fear of alterity in
patriarchal society. Fascism is thus not external to Western society, but a logical extension and continuation
of its fundamental, constitutive traits. The present essay supports this argument of continuity by pointing to
the similarities between Sartre's language and the proto-fascist texts studied in Männerfantasien. Theweleit
not only analyzed the psychic constitution of proto-fascist men, but repeatedly also emphasized the
dialectical implication of antifascist critiques in fascist thinking.
Fascism as the Absolute Other
12
Similar to Jospin's statement quoted at the beginning of this essay, Sartre's "Qu' est-ce qu'un
colloborateur" (1945), although published more than fifty years earlier, asserted that collaborators with the
German occupation force had no real links to contemporary France (48): "soutenu par des armées
étrangeres, il [le collaborateur] ne pouvait être que l'agent de l'étranger" (50). In a by now famous
misspelling, Sartre wrote the French fascist writer Robert Brasillach's name with a z, thereby emphasizing
Brasillach's ideological ties with Nazism and, again, the "foreignness" of this association. As Russell Berman
notes, "[t]his was perhaps no naive error but at least a significant lapsus if not a calculated effort to represent
the collaborator as a traitor, as if the French intellectual could have greeted the Nazis only by surrendering
his native identity and aiding an emphatically foreign power" (xi).
13
The assumption that fascism is categorically "other," i.e., historically and culturally different from
French culture, pervades Sartre's essay. Historically, in addition to this perception of fascism as alien to
Western modernity, two myths in particular still pervade our interpretation of fascism and modernity: that
fascist cultural production was homogenous and artistically inferior, and that modern art heroically resisted
totalitarian ideologies.[3] The problematic concerning the relationship between modern art and fascism, and
between fascism and anti-fascism, is one of the main concerns of this essay.
14
Sartre's essay is one of the most celebrated expressions of an earlier generation that denied any
native French involvement in fascism and established fascism as the absolute Other. Whereas Carroll
equates fascism with "the ideology of masculine superiority radicalized or even absolutized" and "a symptom
of a deep fear [. . .] and violent rejection of nonsubservient or nonidealized women" (148), this essay seeks
to transcend the emphasis on the biological sexes as fixed categories of identity and specifically a stable
concept of the biologically female that plagues not only Sartre's work [4], but also Theweleit's somewhat
essentialist study.
15
If the process of othering, the repudiation of alterity, is at the heart of fascism, the dichotomy that
Sartre attempts to establish between himself and the fascist Other, and by implication between France and
German Nazism, collapses. If, as Theweleit has argued, fascism is an extreme manifestation of what latently
underlies patriarchal societies, forming their foundational discriminatory structure, France, like any
patriarchal society, then bears the roots of fascism within it. The electoral successes in France of the Front
National, whose politics consist mainly in "othering" immigrants and other (non-white) races, corroborate this
point.
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However, it is important not completely to conflate fascism, patriarchy, and othering. As Lynda Hart
observes in Fatal Women, the formation of subjectivity is based on the process of othering, on the
establishment not only of an ego position different from the (m)other, but also on the differentiation from the
"alien" within:
If the "I" is produced through the expulsion of waste products, this process can be understood as a kind
of elemental "othering," a construction of subjectivity based on excluding or expelling the "alien" within.
The body makes waste in order to constitute itself as autonomous, sovereign, pure. The formation of
subjectivity is thus a process that occurs not between discrete subjects but rather through the
concealment of differences that exist within the subject. (98)
17
What differentiates fascism, literary or other, from more "benign" othering as part of the formation of
subjectivity or community identity is the former's totality.[5] Although it is equally important not to conflate the
blind spots of antifascist texts with fascism itself, Sartre's treatment of alterity does fit the description Carroll
gives of the gender ideology and the literary fascism of the French writer Drieu la Rochelle:
Such an ideology is constituted by the project to establish both genders as distinct and totalizable
identities, to make man as such or woman as such either an ideal type or the representative of absolute
negativity, of a pathological deviation from and threat to the norm or ideal represented by the other. If
this is so, no approach that accepts such distinctions and the hierarchies they impose, no matter which
term is privileged or how vigorously the masculinist ideology of fascism is opposed, can effectively
undermine the ultimate gender ideal of literary fascism: to be 'total.'" (169-170)
Sartre establishes a strict gender dichotomy and poses both female and male identity as stable and
essential. Woman is represented as a negativized threat to the norm represented by man. It is the totality,
the absoluteness, of the representation of gender in Sartre that is reminiscent of the patriarchy's extreme
outgrowth in fascism.
Abjection
18
In "Qu'est-ce qu'un collaborateur," Sartre moreover discusses collaboration as an illness ("une
maladie"; see above "contamination"), "un fait de désintégration" (46), an extreme danger exerted by the
foreign Other and its collaborators resulting from the disintegration of the French nation. In Sartre's essay,
collaborators are described as threatening the purity, the clean and proper nature of the symbolic inside with
abject contamination, Kristevan excess ("déchet," 48, 49) and, according to Sartre, they therefore have to be
ab-jected.
19
Kristeva's psychoanalytical essay establishes an analogy between the perceived threat to the body
politic and the imagined threat to the organic body and the self traditionally associated with it. She theorizes
the threat of ego dissolution, of disintegration, of a falling back into a pre-oedipal state of non-differentiation.
Following the anthropologist Mary Douglas' influential work, Purity and Danger, it can be argued that our
understanding of complex social formations and views of social order and cohesion take as their model our
interpretations of the structure of living organisms. As Tina Campt has outlined, Douglas' "work theorizes
how the perceived danger of bodily pollution and aspirations to purity and its maintenance symbolizes the
relationship between parts of society and mirrors desires for hierarchy, symmetry and homogeneity in the
larger social system" (no pag.). Within the cultural and historical context discussed in this essay (France and
Germany during the 1940s), the symbolically constructed boundaries of the body politic of the nation are
imagined and represented as analogous to (equally symbolically constructed) bodily boundaries. These
boundaries are involved in the constitution not only of national, but also of racial (or rather raced/racialized)
and gendered forms of identity (Aryans vs. non-Aryans, men vs. women). As we will see in the brief analysis
of Sartre's homophobia that follows and my longer discussion of the gender ideology in Sartre's work, the
national body politic itself is clearly gendered (as well as raced or racialized, although race is not the primary
focus of this essay). In brief, the notion of bodily boundaries and the perceived consequences of their
transgression and violation in social terms are at the heart of Kristeva's theory of abjection. The extreme fear
of contamination of the Volkskörper, in its literal as well as figurative sense, is characteristic of literary and
non-literary texts from the era of National Socialism. Although Sartre critiques exactly this fear of
contamination (by the Jewish body) in Réflexions sur la question juive (40), the same fear is found in his
"Qu'est-ce qu'un collaborateur?".
20 What is most threatening, of course (as the Lynda Hart quote cited above already showed), is that the
Other is really first and foremost inside — inside the symbolic system and inside the ego — and that this
threatening inside can only be "projected" outside.[6] Sartre as well establishes a link between collaboration
and the collaborator's "inner nature," which is latent but manifests itself under the right circumstances (43).
Sartre's collaborators, in other words, were already subject to the disintegration of the self before they
succumbed to the integrative forces offered them by Nazism (which provided them with what Theweleit calls
an "ego armour"). Sartre describes this inner nature as inherently traitorous. The repression he consequently
advocates is clearly reflective of the simultaneous repression and controlled incitement of feminized libidinal
drives in patriarchal society. As Theweleit has demonstrated, fascist thinking takes this fear of the
(feminized) inner drives and the ensuing repression and controlled incitement to its most acute level.
Whereas Sartre argues that the collaborator tries to kill off "the human" in himself ("anéantir l'humain en lui
et chez les autres," 60), he (Sartre) does not seem to be aware that his own article, submitting to a rigidity
and restrictiveness reminiscent of fascist texts, targets inner human nature and its disintegrative pull as the
very source of the described problem (collaboration). Without elaborating further, Sartre advocates
repressive laws that would keep what he describes as the femininized drives of democracy ("un ennemi que
les sociétés démocratiques portent [. . .] en leur sein;" 60) under control: "il convient qu'on fasse enfin des
lois restrictives: il ne doit pas avoir de liberté contre la liberté" (60). On the intrapsychic level, the mechanism
— the repudiation of the Other — is the same for both the collaborator as described by Sartre, and for Sartre
himself. This mechanism also finds expression in Sartre's dualistic and hegemonic language, when he
consistently refers to the collaborator as an essential(ist) "il," who is then continuously — but, as I have
shown, ultimately in vain — opposed to the "nous" of the article.
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Reflecting patriarchal societies' feminization of the abject Other, the Sartre of "Qu'est-ce qu'un
collaborateur?", in clearly misogynist and homophobic fashion, discusses collaborators with the German
occupation force as weak, effeminate men, as women and/or as homosexuals[7], and as societal misfits ('les
éléments marginaux," 46; "les ratés," 47). The collaborator, according to Sartre, uses "les armes du faible,
de la femme," i.e., "la ruse, l'astuce [. . .] le charme et la séduction" (58). As we can see from the syntactic
juxtaposition of "femininité" and "haine de l'homme" in the essay (60), the target of the perceived threat
posed by the feminine is man.
Les mouches and La nausée
22
The repudiation of the feminized Other that characterizes Sartre's essay "Qu'est-ce qu'un
collaborateur" is also a trait of his drama Les mouches, written two years earlier. Since Theweleit examines
the intense fear of the feminine as the central trait of both the patriarchal and fascist psychological
constitutions, my investigation of Sartre's drama focuses on the representation of the female protagonist,
Electra; but contrary to earlier, at times essentialist studies of Sartre's "sexism," I also want to look beyond
anatomical sex or gender. As this essay will further show, existence, nature, the fluvial facticity of the en-soi,
sexuality, maternal engulfment, and feminized abjection are what Sartre's characters fear, what causes their
nausea and what — like Kristeva's abject — fascinates them at the same time. By the end of Sartre's play,
the threatening feminized force represented by Electra has been contained, appropriated and absorbed by
the male hero, Orestes. Whereas Oreste Pucciani asserts that "Sartre was perfectly aware of the dangers of
dualism and protected himself against it" (153), I argue that in contrast to Hegel's work, Sartre's rigid
dualistic ontology denies the possibility of a synthesis or mediation between the (masculinized) self and the
(feminized) Other. Whereas Theweleit's protofascist subjects found their protective "ego armours" in military
mass formations, Sartre establishes a rigid binary philosophical system to fend off the perceived threat
posed by feminized abjection.
23
A juxtaposition of Les mouches with the protofascist texts analyzed in Männerfantasien is especially
intriguing since Sartre himself repeatedly emphasized the political, antifascist implications of his modern
Oresteia adaptation, and since the validation of Les mouches as "a work of political protest" (Pucciani 159)
has gone largely unquestioned in Sartre scholarship.[8] Following Sartre's essay "Paris sous l'Occupation,"
which describes the Vichy régime's cult of remorse, national defeat and humiliation, the attitude of the
people of Argos, who live in fear and remorse, can indeed be read as a thematization and critique of the
attitude of the French people during the Nazi occupation. As Ingrid Galster points out, Vichy propaganda
spread the idea that the French defeat was a logical consequence of the sins committed by the French
during the Third Republic (12). In this vein, the character of Jupiter can be interpreted as Hitler, and
Aegisthus as the Vichy government or Pétain. In his Sartre biography, Ronald Hayman furthermore argues
that Clytemnestra can be read as a collaborator: "The queen represents the docile conformism of occupied
France: 'For fifteen years we have kept silent, and only our eyes betray us" (187). Hayman's reading makes
Orestes and Electre appear as Resistance fighters. Like Orestes' liberation of Argos, the Résistance was, "a
movement not of revolution but of revolt. It had no intention of taking power after the war; its single goal was
to liberate France from the occupying Nazi forces" (McCall 23). The critique of paternalistic authority
structures in Sartre's play, finally, can be seen as a critique of Pétain's speeches proclaiming the renewal of
France along the lines of a clerical and restorative paternalism (Kohut 158).
24 In contrast, or rather in addition, to the interpretations prevalent in criticism on Sartre of the surface text
of Les mouches as a liberal, antipaternalistic and antifascist text, a reading of the subtext, of the "excess" (in
Kristeva's sense) of Sartre's play, reveals a language that is not only profoundly patriarchal, but reminiscent
of the proto-fascist texts examined by Theweleit. The dualistic role distribution between Electra and Orestes
in Sartre's play reflects the binary structure of Western patriarchal thought, where, as feminist theorists such
as Hélène Cixous (in the section "Sorties" of La jeune née) have pointed out, the devalued side of
oppositions such as weakness/strength and nature/culture is associated with the feminine. In Sartre's play,
women are again depicted as inefficient and impotent. In contrast to Jean Giraudoux' Oresteia adaptation,
Electre, written six years earlier, Sartre's Electra is clearly weaker than her brother Orestes. At the beginning
of the play, she declares herself too weak to deal with Jupiter, the representative of paternalism, on her own.
She waits for Orestes, the male phallic hero ("avec sa grande épée," Les mouches 125), to reveal the
hollowness of divine authority and to kill her hated mother and step-father. After Orestes has then declared
his determination to kill his mother and Aegisthus, Electra accepts Orestes as her brother and acknowledges
his male authority: "Oreste, tu es mon frère aîné et le chef de notre famille, prends-moi dans tes bras,
protège-moi, car nous allons au-devant de très grandes souffrances" (Les mouches 182). Electra sketches
the picture of a patriarchal family, in which authority is based on gender and age and entails the protection of
the "weaker sex."
25 The same dualistic and hegemonic rhetoric also structures the rest of the play. In contrast to Orestes,
who represents metaphysical freedom and authenticity, Electra is shown as ultimately still embroiled in
negativized paternalistic authority structures. In spite of her initially very vocal and determined opposition to
Jupiter, her latent entanglement in paternalistic conventions becomes manifest when, ravaged by remorse
after the murder of Clytemnestra and Aegisthus, she accepts Jupiter's interpretation of her act as that of a
child who does not bear responsibility. By accepting this interpretation, Electra falls back into paternalistic —
i.e. divine, royal and paternal — authority structures, the master-slave dichotomy, and the state of an object
(in Sartre's terminology, the state of en-soi): "Au secours! Jupiter, roi des Dieux et des hommes, mon roi,
prends-moi dans tes bras, emporte-moi, protège-moi. Je suivrai ta loi, je serai ton esclave et ta chose,
j'embrasserai tes pieds et tes genoux" (Les mouches 239; my emphases).
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As Ninette Bailey and Stuart Zane Charmé have both demonstrated, this binary distribution or split
between privileged virility and deprivileged/negativized femininity is representative of Sartre's work as a
whole. It also structures his first major philosophical treatise, L'être et le néant, published in the same year
as Les mouches (1943), in which Sartre establishes his famous distinction between être-en-soi, which
stands for inanimate objects, non-human nature, whose being coincides with itself, and être-pour-soi, human
consciousness.
L'être et le néant and Les mouches clearly complement each other. What separates and distances
27
Orestes from (devalued, feminized) nature or pure existence is his consciousness, which includes his
alienation from and dismissal of divine authority. Orestes's murder of his mother, a crime against nature,
further reinforces his alienation from nature: "Etranger à moi-même, je sais. Hors nature, contre nature, sans
excuse, sans autre recours qu'en moi." (Les mouches 235) What Jupiter offers in Sartre's play is a return to
the en-soi of unconscious nature. He tries to persuade Orestes to leave Argos by illuminating a stone (177).
[9] Leaving Argos would deter Orestes from finding his human essence (consciousness) and instead lead
him back to mere existence (en-soi), to the massiveness of an object in non-human nature, a stone.
Contrary to Orestes, at the end of the play Electra chooses to return to the unreflective state of en-soi, the
state in which the people of Argos find themselves throughout the play. The female protagonist, like many of
the other female characters in Sartre's dramas[10], comes to represent what Sartre (in L'être et le néant)
criticizes as bad faith (mauvaise foi), dishonesty, self-deception.
28
In the section "Les conduites de mauvaise foi" of L'être et le néant, Sartre poses the question "Que
doit être l'homme en son être, s'il doit pouvoir être de mauvaise foi?" When he starts to answer this question
in the next paragraph, his first sentence reads: "Voici, par exemple, une femme [. . .]" (94). On the following
page, he predictably concludes: "Nous dirons que cette femme est de mauvaise foi" (95). "Man," on the
other hand, is associated with candor, sincerity, with the opposite of bad faith: "Si l'homme est ce qu'il est, la
mauvaise foi est à tout jamais impossible et la franchise cesse d'être son ideal pour devenir son être" (98).
29
Another example Sartre gives of bad faith is a homosexual, also repeatedly referred to as "un
pédéraste" (103-105). Sartre's homophobia becomes obvious in passages such as the following:
"L'homosexuel reconnaît ses fautes [my emphasis], mais il lutte de toutes ses forces contre l'écrasante
perspective que ses erreurs [my emphasis] lui constituent un destin" (104). With regard to "the homosexual,"
Sartre's appeal for sincerity is couched in the following terms: "Péché avoué est à moitié pardonné" (104; my
emphasis). And he refers to the homosexual as "[le] coupable" (105), the guilty one.
30 At the end of Les mouches, Electra falls prey to bad faith. Like Daniel in Le sursis or the Autodidact
and the bourgeois in La nausée, she accepts the calm and permanency of an object, delivered from
freedom, responsibility and existential anxiety. She uses her submission to God (Jupiter) as an escape from
the human condition.
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The devaluation not only of women and homosexuals, but also of feminized inner and outer nature
links Sartre's work to Western patriarchal ideology and ultimately as well to fascism as theorized in
Männerfantasien. Since in this tradition feminized libidinal drives are perceived as threatening, Les mouches
advocates an ideology of emotional restraint. Whereas Orestes, the male hero, thinks rationally and
therefore does not come to repent what he has done, Electra is consumed by feelings of guilt, because her
participation in the murder was — like Clytemnestra's murder of Agamemnon — an act of passion, of hatred.
In L'existentialisme est un humanisme, Sartre, giving expression to the patriarchal and specifically bourgeois
distrust of libidinal drives, denigrates passion:
L'existentialiste ne croit pas à la puissance de la passion. Il ne pensera jamais qu'une belle passion est
un torrent dévastateur qui conduit fatalement l'homme à certains actes, et qui, par conséquent, est une
excuse. Il pense que l'homme est responsable de sa passion. (37-38)
Passion, according to Sartre, is an escape, an excuse. While Electra consequently cannot escape the
plague of the city of Argos, namely, the flies, symbolizing guilt and repentance, Orestes does not feel
bothered by them (209). In contrast to Electra's miserable fate at the end of the play, the last sentence of Act
II has Orestes say: "Demain je parlerai à mon peuple" (210). Orestes is the new king of Argos, the new —
male — authority.
32 As we have seen, it is above all women who are associated with unreflective nature and with animals
in Sartre's play. Whereas Orestes senses his alienation from nature, Electra is depicted as still part of nature
and metaphorically linked to animals.[11] In their black mourning attire, the women of Argos as well
resemble the flies of the play's title. The association between animals and (feminized) lack of consciousness
also becomes clear when Aegisthus calls his subjects (represented as women), whom he keeps in a state of
fear and does not want to know that they are free, "chiens" (Les mouches 165), dogs.
33 Establishing a link between feminized sexuality, violence, and animal imagery, Sartre uses the latter to
thematize the threat posed by feminized and negativized libidinal drives ("inner nature"). In Powers of
Horror, Kristeva links the abject to animals:
The abject confronts us, on the one hand, with those fragile states where man strays on the territories of
animal. Thus, by way of abjection, primitive societies have marked out a precise area of their culture in
order to remove it from the threatening world of animals or animalism, which were representative of sex
and murder. (12-13; my emphasis)
In his Die Traumdeutung (The Interpretation of Dreams), Freud interprets animals in dreams as the
displacement of the repressed libido. Animal imagery marks the site where libidinal energy and violence
meet.
34 In Sartre's play, the apathy of the people of Argos, who fail to warn the returning Agamemnon of the
impending violence and danger to his life, is linked to "volupté" and "une femme en rut," a woman "in heat."
In the same passage, Jupiter then refers to an old woman as an insect and a fish, as
cette vieille cloporte, là-bas, qui trottine de ses petites pattes noires, en rasant les murs; c'est un beau
spécimen de cette faune noire et plate qui grouille dans les lézardes. Je bondis sur l'insecte, je le saisis
et je vous le ramène [. . .]. Voilà ma pêche [. . .]. Voyez ces soubresauts de poisson au bout d'une ligne.
(Les mouches 111)
The woman's "voluptuousness" and silence are held responsible for Agamemnon's death and thus ultimately
for bringing the flies to Argos. With reference to the murder of Agamemnon, Jupiter says to the old woman:
"Tu as rudement bien dû faire l'amour cette nuit-là" (Les mouches 112). This conflation of violence and
sexuality is reminiscent of the texts examined by Theweleit, whose fascist subjects' only access to sexuality
is through a sexualization of violence. Uncontrolled, unmastered, abject sexuality and nature are what
Sartre's characters — like Theweleit's protofascist subjects — fear, what causes their nausea, and what —
again like Kristeva's abject — at the same time exerts a deadly fascination over them.
35 Abjection, the fear of engulfment by what is only projected outward, namely the inner drives, the fear of
border transgression and ensuing erasure by the feminine, is addressed in Les mouches as well as in other
texts of Sartre's, such as La nausée. In La nausée, cities figure as protection from "wild nature," from the
feared libidinal drives:
J'ai peur des villes. Mais il ne faut pas en sortir. Si on s'aventure trop loin, on rencontre le cercle de la
Végétation. La Végétation a rampé pendant des kilomètres vers les villes. Elle attend. Quand la ville
sera morte, la Végétation l'envahira, elle grimpera sur les pierres, elle les enserrera, les fouillera, les
fera éclater de ses longues pinces noires; elle aveuglera les trous et laissera pendre partout des pattes
vertes. Il faut rester dans les villes, tant qu'elles sont vivantes, il ne faut pas pénétrer [!] seul sous cette
grande chevelure qui est à leurs portes: il faut laisser onduler et craquer sans témoins. Dans les villes,
si l'on sait s'arranger, choisir les heures où les bêtes digèrent ou dorment, dans leurs trous, derrière des
amoncellements de détritus organiques, on ne rencontre guère que des minéraux, les moins effrayants
des existants. (La nausée 217-218)
The unpredictabilty of what escapes the laws of the symbolic, the threat of the feminine ("elle"), is also
addressed in the following passage:
Cependant, la grande nature vague s'est glissée dans leur ville, elle s'est infiltrée, partout, dans leur
maison, dans leurs bureaux, en eux-mêmes. Elle ne bouge pas, elle se tient tranquille et eux, ils sont en
plein dedans, ils la respirent et ils ne la voient pas, ils s'imaginent qu'elle est dehors, à vingt lieues de la
ville. Je la vois, moi, cette nature, je la vois [. . .]. Je sais que sa soumission est paresse, je sais qu'elle
n'a pas de lois: ce qu'ils prennent pour sa constance [. . .]. Elle n'a que des habitudes et elle peut en
changer demain. (La nausée 221)
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36 The patronne of La nausée, who is — due to not only her skin color, but also her maternal traits — a
"white woman" in Theweleit's sense, conjures up the fear of the devouring mother. Her scent, that of "a
newborn child," can be interpreted as a Freudian displacement for the mother. Whereas this mother figure
smothers the narrator, pressing him against her maternal breast, he rescues himself psychologically by
"distractedly" evoking the image of another male figure and "intellectual" pursuits. The narrator's reaction to
feminized sexuality expressed in metaphors of lower flora and fauna is a feeling of disgust and physiological
sickness. The verb vomir not only denotes physiological disgust; vomiting also marks a border
transgression, the transgression of the bodily boundary between inside and outside and thus, abjection.
J'ai dîné au Rendezvous des Cheminots. La patronne étant là, j'ai dû la baiser, mais c'était bien par
politesse. Elle me dégoûte un peu, elle est trop blanche et puis elle sent le nouveau-né. Elle me serrait
la tête contre sa poitrine dans un débordement de passion: elle croit bien faire. Pour moi, je grapillais
distraitement son sexe sous les couvertures; puis mon bras s'est engourdi. Je pensais a M. de
Rollebon: après tout, qu'est-ce qui m'empêche d'écrire un roman sur sa vie? J'ai laissé aller mon bras le
long du flanc de la patronne et j'ai vu soudain un petit jardin avec des arbres bas et larges d'où
pendaient d'immenses feuilles couvertes de poils. Des fourmis couraient partout, des mille-pattes et des
teignes. Il y avait des bêtes encore plus horribles: leurs corps était fait d'une tranche de pain grillé
comme on en met en canapé sous les pigeons; elles marchaient de côté avec des pattes de crabe. Les
larges feuilles étaient toutes noires de bêtes. Derrière des cactus et des figuiers de Barbarie, la Velléda
du Jardin public désignait son sexe du doigt. "Ce jardin sent le vomi," criai-je. (La nausée 88-89)
As Kristeva explains, the expulsion of what is inside, nausea, is a protective mechanism necessary to the
subject's ego formation. [12]In the passage quoted above, vomiting abjects the threatening inner drives and
protects the ego from dissolution, from being engulfed by the suffocating mother.
37
Matrophobia, the fear of the archaic mother, also finds its expression in Les mouches, where the
feminized Erinyes are depicted as a perversion of maternal love and metaphorically linked to animals, fluids,
floods and innundation. In Aeschylus' ancient version of the Oresteia, the Erinyes already represent
Clytemnestra's spirit. In Sartre's adaption, the First Erinye, conjuring up images of the engulfing, devouring
and suffocating mother, declares that she will roll on Orestes' and Electra's stomachs and chests "comme un
torrent sur des cailloux" (Les mouches 213; my emphasis) and further states: "La haine m'inonde et me
suffoque, elle monte dans mes seins comme du lait" (Les mouches 214; my emphasis). She then further
predicts her penetration of Electra's body: "J'entrerai en toi comme le mâle en la femelle, car tu es mon
épouse, et tu sentiras le poids de mon amour" (Les mouches 214). Similar to fluids, the Erinyes, who are
(traditionally and also in Sartre) depicted as women, overstep and blur boundaries — including bodily
boundaries and the boundaries between male and female sexuality — and are exponents of Kristeva's
abject. Moreover, as in Aeschylus, the Erinyes are metaphorically associated with putrefaction and pus (Les
mouches 216), a contamination of clean, proper matter with improper matter.
38 In Les mouches, the threat posed by abjection is thematized not only in the description of the Erinyes,
but also in that of the title metaphor — the flies. The flies, which have an important symbolic function, are
attracted by flesh/meat and are agents of contamination. The pedagogue who travels with Orestes calls the
old women of Argos "[v]ieilles carnes" (Les mouches 104), literally "pieces of old, spoiled meat," establishing
a metaphorical link between the flies, putrefaction, contamination, and feminized fluidity [13] — abjection.
The eyes of the idiot at the beginning of the play are infested with flies. His eyes secrete a white liquid
resembling sour milk (Les mouches 107), again conjuring up the theme of the mother as the primary abject.
Like fluids that transgress boundaries and blur and contaminate the categories of the symbolic system,
causing pollution, the flies in Argos do not fit conventional categories; they are bigger than ordinary flies (Les
mouches 107) and more invasive/threatening. The city of Argos is beset by abjection. Not only is it infested
with flies, but the towns around it view the repentance of the inhabitants of Argos as a plague and are afraid
of being contaminated.[14]
39
The link between Electra, animals, and feminized abjection becomes even clearer when Aegisthus
orders Electra to leave town. He declares that if she is still inside the city walls, i.e., the masculinized inside
or center, the next day at dawn, she will be slaughtered "comme une brebis galeuse," like a mangy sheep
(Les mouches 166). Electra, who, like a diseased animal, is threatening contamination, needs to be expelled
from the center, abjected. When Electra's dance is interrupted by Jupiter, the people call Electra a
seductress and a witch: "Nous n'avons rien fait, ça n'est pas notre faute, elle est venue, elle nous a séduits
par ses paroles empoisonnées! A la rivière, la sorcière, à la riviêre! Au bûcher!" (Les mouches 164-165).
Hans-Peter Dürr analyzes the witch as a woman who continually crosses the boundary between inside and
outside, culture and nature, civilization and wilderness (46).
40
By depicting feminized abjection as a negative threat, Sartre's play participates in the patriarchal
process of othering described by Kristeva. There are only two instances in the play where abjection seems
to be presented as a positive force: the Electra of the beginning of Les mouches, who is still representing
Agamemmnon's masculine claim until Orestes comes to replace her in that role; and finally Orestes, the
male hero, who has recognized his existential freedom. As the discussion of the viscous and of sexual
desire in L'être et le néant will show as well, Sartre's work gives expression to the extreme fear of abjection
— ultimately, the fear of maternal engulfment and sexuality — that, as Theweleit has suggested, is at the
basis of both patriarchal society and fascism.
Page 9:
41
By the end of Les mouches, the threatening force represented by Electra, the threat posed by
abjection, has been contained and transferred to — not to say, absorbed by — the male hero. This
dénouement, among other traits, marks Sartre's Les mouches as a product of patriarchal society and a
masculinist play, which depicts masculinized violence and sexuality as positive. Orestes addresses his
sister, who is identified with the feminized city. For Sartre any encounter with the feminized Other is a project
of forceful appropriation, not to say rape.
Viens Electre, regarde notre ville. Elle est là, rouge sous le soleil, bourdonnante d'hommes et de
mouches, dans l'engourdissement têtu d'un après-midi d'été; elle me repousse de tous ses murs, de
tous ses toits, de toutes ses portes closes. Et pourtant elle est à prendre, je le sens depuis ce matin. Et
toi aussi, Electre, tu es à prendre. Je vous prendrai. Je deviendrai hache et je fendrai en deux ces
murailles obstinées, j'ouvrirai le ventre de ces maisons bigotes, elles exhaleront par leurs plaies
béantes une odeur de mangeaille et d'encens; je deviendrai cognée et je m'enfoncerai dans le coeur de
cette ville comme la cognée dans le coeur d'un chêne. (Les mouches 179; my emphasis)
Reinforcing the philosophical proximity of Les mouches and L'être et le néant, the theme of appropriation
also gains particular insistence in Part Four of L'être et le néant.
L'être et le néant
42
The fundamental concepts of Sartre's analysis in L'être et le néant, namely pour-soi, en-soi, pourautrui, and en-soi-pour-soi are based on Hegel (Fürsich, Ansich, Für-Andere, Ansich-Fürsich).[15] It was
Hegel who introduced — but, given the history of Western patriarchy, in no way invented — the master-slave
dialectic, the dichotomy between "Herr" (master, lord) and "Knecht" (slave, servant, bondsman). He
distinguishes between "two opposed shapes of consciousness": "one is the independent consciousness
whose essential nature is to be for itself, the other is the dependent consciousness, whose essential nature
is simply to love or to be for another: the former is lord, the other is bondsman" (115).
43
Contrary to Hegel, however, Sartre denies the possibility of a synthesis or mediation between the
subject (pour-soi) and the object (en-soi). Although the goal of the for-itself's totalizing appropriation is the
establishment of the in-itself-for-itself, although, according to Sartre, man's desire is to be simultaneously ensoi and pour-soi — self-sufficient like a thing, but endowed with the freedom human consciousness provides
— , the totality of en-soi-pour-soi [16] is ultimately illusory. In Sartre's philosophy, the higher dialectical
synthesis, which Christianity identifies with God and Hegel with Absolute Knowledge, remains an
unachievable ideal. As Sartre's drama Huis clos with its famous proclamation "L'enfer c'est les autres"
demonstrates, for Sartre, the basic relationship with others consists of conflict:
Pendant que je tente de me libérer de l'emprise d'autrui, autrui tente de se libérer de la mienne; pendant
que je cherche à asservir autrui, autrui cherche à m'asservir. Il ne s'agit nullement ici de relations
unilatérales avec un objet-en-soi, mais de rapports réciproques et mouvants [. . .]. Le conflit est le sens
originel de l'être-pour-autrui (L'être 431).
44 The power struggle between the for-itself and the in-itself in Sartre's philosophy and dramatic oeuvre is
a variation of the struggle for domination that characterizes both Western patriarchal thought and practice
and fascism. Sartre critiques neither the pour-soi's attempt to establish mastery nor the basic binary and
oppositional structure of Western thought; instead, his work can itself be analyzed as a product of the
Western logic of mastery and domination. The struggle for domination negates playful ambivalence, abjects
it, and affirms dualistic structures.
45
In the subchapter "La Psychanalyse existentielle" of L'être et le néant, Sartre describes the threat
posed to the pour-soi by the viscous, a clearly negativized, "hostile" and "horrible" state. Like Kristeva's
abject, the slimy, despite its repulsive character, exerts a deadly, trap-like fascination and poses the threat of
fusion, degradation, ego-dissolution (e.g. L'être 701), and engulfment by the (m)other. The physiological
reaction to the viscous is "a sweetish sort of disgust" (Manser 12), nausea (e.g. L'être 404)
Page 10:
46 Like the abject, the slimy is essentially ambiguous, "[une] substance entre deux états" (L'être 699), a
substance between solid and liquid matter. The encounter of for-itself and in-itself is an encounter between
masculinized mind (liquid) and feminized and sexualized[17] matter (solid). The ensuing matter, the viscous
or slimy, as well is feminized in L'être et le néant: "c'est une activité molle, baveuse et feminine
d'aspiration" (700), a soft, yielding, feminine sucking, or "[la] [r]évanche douceâtre et féminine [de l'Ensoi]" (701); it is "comme l'étalement, le raplatissement des seins un peu mûrs d'une femme qui s'étend sur
son dos" (699). (The "ripe" breasts of a woman are of course those of the threatening, engulfing mother.)
Whereas the masculinized pour-soi attempts to absorb and possess the feminized en-soi, the slimy resists
this project of assimilation and turns the tables on the for-itself, in turn appropriating it. The clear distinction
between the in-itself and the for-itself, the clear delineation of classificatory boundaries, is thus impossible to
maintain. Abjection sets in.
47 In this context, it is again interesting to compare the reaction to the viscous — which is ultimately the
reaction to abjection and the threat of maternal engulfment and sexuality — to Sartre's description (also in
L'être et le néant) of sexual desire, which is associated with fear, the fear of the erasure of the rational,
conscious ego, and "une douceur lourde et pâteuse" (457). Sexual desire, due to the threat it poses to
consciousness of being invaded, submerged by the fluvial facticity of the en-soi (L'être 457) (as opposed to
the "dry" characteristics of hunger), has to be subdued, repressed.
48 As we have seen, in spite of the dualistic rigidity of Sartre's work, one part of the opposition actually
represents the negativized and repressed part of the self, which has been pro- and ab-jected outward. The
qualities of the slimy, for instance, can be read, in a manner reminiscent of Theweleit's analysis of the
psychological constitution of the proto-fascist Freikorps members and their "projection" outward of feminized
libidinal drives, as a projection outward of the negativized, and therefore repressed, internal qualities of the
self. However, in contrast to a Hegelian recognition of the self in the other and an ensuing reconciliation, in
Sartre's dualistic ontology, mutual influence or exchange, intersubjectivity in Jessica Benjamin's sense, does
not take place: "Les subjectivités demeurent hors d'atteinte et radicalement séparés" (L'être 498). In Huis
clos, Manser observes, "all three characters are in hell precisely because they are prevented by their own
choices from establishing any proper relations with those around them" (98). The inability to form object
relations, the fear of social interpenetration and mixing, is also one of the dominant features of the fascist
psychological constitution as analyzed by Theweleit.
49 The result of Sartre's fear of the other and of the antithetical rigidity that ensues from it, the result of the
fight for the subject position at the expense of the other's reduction to an object, is isolation. The pattern of
domination prevalent in patriarchal society "leaves the self encapsulated in a closed system" (J. Benjamin
67). For Sartre the problem does not consist in realizing human freedom in the world, but on defending it
from the world, when he writes in La nausée for example:
Le voilà encore qui me regarde. Cette fois il va me parler, je me sens tout raide. Ce n'est pas de la
sympathie qu'il y a entre nous: nous sommes pareils, voilà. Il est seul comme moi, mais plus enfoncé
que moi dans la solitude. Il doit attendre sa Nausée ou quelque chose de ce genre. Il y a donc à présent
des gens qui me reconnaissent, qui pensent, après m'avoir dévisagé: "Celui-là est des nôtres." Eh
bien? Que veut-il? Il doit bien savoir que nous ne pouvons rien l'un pour l'autre. Les familles sont dans
leurs maisons, au milieu de leurs souvenirs. Et nous voici, deux épaves sans mémoire. S'il se levait tout
d'un coup, s'il m'adressait la parole, je sauterais en l'air. (97)
In Sartre, the subject's destiny is solitary, absolute freedom: "Autrui est par principe l'insaississable: il me fuit
quand je le cherche et me possède quand je le fuis" (L'être 479). Human solidarity and identification with the
other in Albert Camus' sense cannot be realized in Sartre's system of thought.
50
Here it becomes clear that the universal responsibility that Sartre advocates, "l'universalité de
l'homme," (L'Existentialisme 70, 74) in fact only consists of a fending off of the others' threat to one's own
subjectivity (the threat of engulfment by the Other), an absorption instead of others' subject positions, and an
imposition of one's own choice on them: "Tout ce qui vaut pour moi vaut pour autrui" (L'être 431). In Les
mouches, Orestes assimilates, appropriates Electra's, the Other's, freedom. His existentialist project of
recovering himself is, ultimately, a project of absorbing the Other. Since human solidarity and "fraternity" are
unachievable, Orestes remains free, but alone. At the end of the play, he again leaves Argos.
Page 11:
Conclusion
51
Contrary to Sartre's claims to an unequivocally antifascist ideological stance, his early work
demonstrates the historical continuity between the modern European patriarchal tradition and fascism, and
the dialectical implication even of antifascist philosophy and art in fascist thinking. As this article has aimed
to demonstrate, Sartre's early work shows a gender ideology reminiscent of the proto-fascist texts analyzed
in Theweleit's classic text on fascism, Männerfantasien. Both the texts analyzed in Theweleit and Sartre's
texts examined here are characterized by an extreme fear of the feminized, abject Other — a fear of (inner
and outer) nature, sexuality, maternal engulfment and ego dissolution. Sartre establishes a rigid, dualistic
philosophical system as a protective armor against the imagined threat of invasion or contamination posed
by feminized abjection. Due to this phobic rigidity, Sartre's fictive characters as well as his philosophy betray
an inability to form object relations already familiar from Theweleit's study. According to Horkheimer and
Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment, this modern inability to establish non-instrumentalized interpersonal
relations and the consequent perception of any libidinal desire as ultimate threat found its most radicalized
expression in twentieth century European fascism. If, as Theweleit has argued, fascism is an extreme
manifestation of what is latently always already present in the basic exclusionary and phobic structure of
patriarchy, France — like any patriarchal society — bears the roots of fascism within it. The exploration of
the work of one of France's most influential antifascist writers and leading intellectuals of the twentieth
century confirms this assessment.
Page 12:
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